Save Points

[mattyboi]

After playing a few sandboxes to "mid-game" and one into "late-game" I have one point to suggest that affects my gaming experience/playability and that is save points, or more specifically, the lack thereof. Before I go on, let me first point out that I agree with the harsh/permadeath aspect of the game; I think it enhances the overall survival feel of the game and my preference would be not to nerf this.

With that said however, I'm finding that as I move a sandbox into what I would call the mid-game stage, I end up playing that sandbox less frequently, and primarily because when I sit down and open up Steam and figure out what game I want to play, the primarily thing that I think about is "how much time to do I have to play a game before I have to do something else?" During the work week this may be around an hour or so, sometimes less. Unfortunately, I find that once I move past the mid-game, a lot of things that I want to accomplish take longer than this, and if I'm in the middle of, say, hunting or traveling, it is often not advisable for me to take out a bedroll and sleep just so I can get a save. This is even more true at the higher difficulty levels when weather and wildlife behavior can make resting-for-save even less advisable.

The only other recourse is to move your sandbox to certain maps (I'm primarily thinking of Coastal Highway) where indoor save points are more frequently available, but then the game becomes fairly monotonous just playing on one map.

Aren't there other ways to incorporate more user-friendly save options than what we currently have available to help alleviate this problem? Such as the typical "You cannot save while enemies are nearby" method, or something similar? It seems like there should be options that don't sacrifice the challenge of the game, but still allow the game to be playable for gamers with real life obligations.

[Carbon]

 There are a few threads about this seemingly oft-discussed topic and some good ideas posted against a backdrop of similar comment to yours @mattyboi.

 The latest is here:

 I wasn't suggesting that your points aren't worth discussing or are otherwise unimportant, but maybe have a read through the linked thread and see if anything there helps to explain the current mechanic's rationale. TLD isn't a game one can jump into for ten minutes, a fact that also restricts my play times to when I have longer swaths to spare. That's kind of what keeps it fresh for me though; if I were to play it daily, it might just lose it's appeal faster. I play once or twice per week and that on the weekends when I can burn a couple of hours.

 My one comment that would support some kind of save system is when real life suddenly demands my attention. My dog always seems to know when I am crossing the Ravine bridge or similar.

[mattyboi]

@Carbon Ah, thank you for the link. It doesn't surprise me that some one else has brought this up previously. However, I thought I would leave my personal feedback in the forum, as it does affect my personal game play, and consequently, my interest in future DLC, and my recommendations to other players, etc.

[Jolan]

I find that in the mid stage games I'm having to go to work (or whatever I have to do while adulting) with the game in pause.  Which considering the power situation in my neighborhood can be something of a gamble.  Not only do I not want to waste an hour or so of daylight, there are times when it is just inadvisable.  

[nicko]

just sleep for 1 hour, the game saves. (well i think it does)

 

[cekivi]

The game does save after sleeping. The difficulty is (as I pointed out in my thread) is if the weather is turning bad or there are predators nearby sleeping is not a good option  

[Dirmagnos]

There should be just save feature, any place any time. One save and thats it, in addition to current system.

Currently i dont play half the times because i have no idea how much time it would take me and i generally play in short bursts of random durations. So normally i chose games that i can save and quit at any time.

[mattyboi]

6 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

There should be just save feature, any place any time. One save and thats it, in addition to current system.

The only drawback I could see to this is if, for example, you're going on a bear hunt, you could do a quick save right before taking your shot. Then if you miss, or even if you do hit but don't get a crit, and then the bear charges you, you could simply quit and restart instead of taking the damage.

I think there should be some circumstances (ie, proximity to carnivores, being outside in a blizzard, having the hypothermia/risk for hypothermia affliction, etc), where the player shouldn't be allowed to save. I do think the harsh risk/reward feel of the game does need to be preserved. But I do think there should be more opportunity for the player to save than is currently available; at least, this would make the game more playable for me.

[cekivi]

Or save after every shot with the bow or rifle.

[Dirmagnos]

On 4/24/2017 at 7:41 PM, mattyboi said:

The only drawback I could see to this is if, for example, you're going on a bear hunt, you could do a quick save right before taking your shot. Then if you miss, or even if you do hit but don't get a crit, and then the bear charges you, you could simply quit and restart instead of taking the damage.

I think there should be some circumstances (ie, proximity to carnivores, being outside in a blizzard, having the hypothermia/risk for hypothermia affliction, etc), where the player shouldn't be allowed to save. I do think the harsh risk/reward feel of the game does need to be preserved. But I do think there should be more opportunity for the player to save than is currently available; at least, this would make the game more playable for me.

You can do that already. If i shoot at the bear, he charges and about to maul me i can just quit to main menu and restart from house. It would take me a bit longer to get back to that bear, but its essentially same.

Creating some limitations for such conditions is a risky way of doing it, as it would create even more absurd situations. Proximity to carnivores mean nothing if that carnivore is not attacking you or you are in safe area, like fishing hut(btw, another critical exploit that desperately need fixing). Being outside in blizzard can also be irrelevant if i have good clothes, so i im not even cooling down to do that at extremely slow pace. And why hypothermia is supposed to be a factor ? What would be the point ? What exactly would prevent me from saving during hypothermia ? If enough limitations were to be added, without extremely fine tuning they will start to overlap and feature will become unusable.

On 4/24/2017 at 9:48 PM, cekivi said:

Or save after every shot with the bow or rifle.

Save scumming is nothing new and players have been doing it since get go, so technically all those "limitations" are nothing more than a nuisance for people who want to have manual save.

[mattyboi]

6 minutes ago, Dirmagnos said:

You can do that already. If i shoot at the bear, he charges and about to maul me i can just quit to main menu and restart from house. It would take me a bit longer to get back to that bear, but its essentially same.

Sure. But using this system, the game punishes you (takes you back to some previous point) for closing out of the game. Being able to save at any point would make this far easier to manipulate.

6 minutes ago, Dirmagnos said:

Proximity to carnivores mean nothing if that carnivore is not attacking you or you are in safe area, like fishing hut(btw, another critical exploit that desperately need fixing). Being outside in blizzard can also be irrelevant if i have good clothes, so i im not even cooling down to do that at extremely slow pace. And why hypothermia is supposed to be a factor ? What would be the point ? What exactly would prevent me from saving during hypothermia ?

Proximity to threats, even if they are not "active" threats, is a pretty typical save restriction in many games. I also mention blizzards since, if you are out in a map like Forlorn Muskeg with few landmarks, and a blizzard reduces your visibility and puts you at risk of freezing, a player could easily manipulate a save feature to navigate out of the situation. Likewise, if you have hypothermia or food poisoning or similar afflictions you have a limited amount of game time to find a solution before certain death; a player could also easily manipulate a save feature to try to find medicine/warmth before death, etc. I'm mostly just throwing out ideas. A developer can make a game as restrictive or non-restrictive as they want by altering save restrictions like this.

[Pillock]

To be quite honest, I don't think there needs to be any change to the game's saving system. It's fine.

Granted, TLD maybe isn't the kind of game that's really suited for a quick 10-20 minute bash. But it doesn't take much longer than that to complete an in-game day, at which point you're going to want to sleep (and therefore save) anyway.

If you need to quit the game in a hurry, you never lose that much progress, and if you need to leave for work or something, just finish your gaming a bit earlier! Good grief!

[Ruruwawa]

I don't think a change is needed, because of Pass Time.  Sure there's a small tradeoff to pass time, but that's a good design IMO.  Make saving/scumming cheap and easy, and you diminish the player's engagement in what makes the game memorable: the feels. 

[cekivi]

Pity it's not convenient to pass time in sorter increments...

[mattyboi]

On 4/26/2017 at 4:36 PM, Pillock said:

Granted, TLD maybe isn't the kind of game that's really suited for a quick 10-20 minute bash. But it doesn't take much longer than that to complete an in-game day, at which point you're going to want to sleep (and therefore save) anyway.

Really, this depends on your personal playing style, and also, where you are at in the game. Like I said initially, early game it's easy to knock out a bunch of days fairly quickly. Also if you're playing pilgrim or even voyager, and you don't need to worry about running out of resources for a long time, then it doesn't cost much to knock out days fairly quickly.

But if you're in late game, and/or at a fairly high difficulty level, and every time you sleep you burn calories/lose condition, which ultimately means you have to hunt, which means you have to make new bows/arrows/fish hooks/fires/improvised tools/etc, then just resting can matter a lot.

[Dirmagnos]

On 4/27/2017 at 1:14 AM, mattyboi said:

Sure. But using this system, the game punishes you (takes you back to some previous point) for closing out of the game. Being able to save at any point would make this far easier to manipulate.

Proximity to threats, even if they are not "active" threats, is a pretty typical save restriction in many games. I also mention blizzards since, if you are out in a map like Forlorn Muskeg with few landmarks, and a blizzard reduces your visibility and puts you at risk of freezing, a player could easily manipulate a save feature to navigate out of the situation. Likewise, if you have hypothermia or food poisoning or similar afflictions you have a limited amount of game time to find a solution before certain death; a player could also easily manipulate a save feature to try to find medicine/warmth before death, etc. I'm mostly just throwing out ideas. A developer can make a game as restrictive or non-restrictive as they want by altering save restrictions like this.

Ease of manipulation is irrelevant, as game already hosts numerous features that do exactly that, like same parasites or cabin fever. Features that serve no practical purpose, but to irritate players.

Typical ? Like what games ?

You are proving exactly my point, but reducing whole feature to one particular example with FM, as conditions will not apply for rest of the maps. It also presumes worst case scenario. Even to players who are familiar with those kind of things will be caught in such situations on extremely rare occasions. Your example wants to restrict feature based on one extremely unlikely scenario.

Plus, i can still reload if i get hopelessly lost - beats dying. And i will actually be in better situation that before, as game usually saves before blizzard even began. So, i an "manipulate" it already. Granted, i would lose some time, but anything beats dying.

In terms of hypothermia and food poisoning that "limited time" is rather lengthily. I can literally walk from one side of the map to another and not be in any direct danger, due to way those conditions(and condition management in general) are implemented. Again, its a feature that would serve purely to annoy players.

[mattyboi]

17 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

Typical ? Like what games ?

Hmmm...probably the earliest example I personally played was the old Quest for Glory c. 1992? And many games since, particularly RPGs. Honestly I'm pretty surprised you're contesting this point, and I'm having a hard time thinking of an RPG that doesn't have some kind of "You cannot "___" at this time".

17 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

Plus, i can still reload if i get hopelessly lost - beats dying. And i will actually be in better situation that before, as game usually saves before blizzard even began. So, i an "manipulate" it already. Granted, i would lose some time, but anything beats dying.

And this is essentially my point; any gamer can find ways to manipulate virtually any mechanic if they really want to. That's not particularly how I enjoy gaming, but if you really feel like quitting/force quitting/rebooting/etc, more power to you. But so long as players already have that ability, why not offer more simplified ways of saving a game to enable players, like myself, who often only have limited playing time available or need to close out on relatively short notice, to play the game more regularly? Especially if there are ways to implement this while still limiting the opportunity for scumming?

It appears that I'm not about to convince you, for whatever reason, and that's fine, I don't really need to. I'm only here in this particular forum to offer feedback, which is, essentially, that the current saving format of the game, limits my play time after about the mid-game, and consequently this limits my interest in purchasing future content or and my ability to recommend this game to my gaming friends, most of whom have similar age/family/real-life-obligations to myself.

[Dirmagnos]

13 hours ago, mattyboi said:

Hmmm...probably the earliest example I personally played was the old Quest for Glory c. 1992? And many games since, particularly RPGs. Honestly I'm pretty surprised you're contesting this point, and I'm having a hard time thinking of an RPG that doesn't have some kind of "You cannot "___" at this time".

And this is essentially my point; any gamer can find ways to manipulate virtually any mechanic if they really want to. That's not particularly how I enjoy gaming, but if you really feel like quitting/force quitting/rebooting/etc, more power to you. But so long as players already have that ability, why not offer more simplified ways of saving a game to enable players, like myself, who often only have limited playing time available or need to close out on relatively short notice, to play the game more regularly? Especially if there are ways to implement this while still limiting the opportunity for scumming?

It appears that I'm not about to convince you, for whatever reason, and that's fine, I don't really need to. I'm only here in this particular forum to offer feedback, which is, essentially, that the current saving format of the game, limits my play time after about the mid-game, and consequently this limits my interest in purchasing future content or and my ability to recommend this game to my gaming friends, most of whom have similar age/family/real-life-obligations to myself.

Im a big RPG fan, but in most cases, or "typical" as you put it, those limitations are related to specific instances that serve to either advance story or prevent breaking game. In LD, on the other hand, most of those limitations exist to screw with player, as they serve no practical purpose. Like saving on every negative condition occurrence.

My point is, that if there is no direct threat to player, then why limit it ? Current "waypoint" saving feature is not particularly practical. in most rpgs saving whenever player sees it fit has become a standard long time ago.

[mattyboi]

2 hours ago, Dirmagnos said:

Im a big RPG fan, but in most cases, or "typical" as you put it, those limitations are related to specific instances that serve to either advance story or prevent breaking game. In LD, on the other hand, most of those limitations exist to screw with player, as they serve no practical purpose. Like saving on every negative condition occurrence.

In TLD sandbox the survival of the character is the story, so if you don't protect the harsh elements of the game, the story becomes nerfed/broken.

[Dirmagnos]

23 hours ago, mattyboi said:

In TLD sandbox the survival of the character is the story, so if you don't protect the harsh elements of the game, the story becomes nerfed/broken.

No, story is story. In sandbox games survival of the character is (relatively)unlimited experience/choice. Thats exactly the purpose of sandbox game type. Lack of restrictions that normally story-driven games provide.

[mattyboi]

1 hour ago, Dirmagnos said:

No, story is story. In sandbox games survival of the character is (relatively)unlimited experience/choice. Thats exactly the purpose of sandbox game type. Lack of restrictions that normally story-driven games provide.

 It seems we are essentially saying the same thing. In the context of no scripted story, the decisions the player makes becomes the story, ie, survival is the story.

[Kyopaxa]

On 2017-4-24 at 8:48 PM, cekivi said:

Or save after every shot with the bow or rifle.

If save at any time is possible, to avoid the "exploit" of saving before an encounter as others say, I'd suggest to save whenever an animal locks on the player. Right now the game saves whenever you have an injury or die, I think save on animal lock would also be a good option. If that is introduced though, devs should make sure to optimize the save code as much as possible so it is light on the system.

If above is correctly implemented, I fail to see why being able to save at any time would be a problem at all.

[Dirmagnos]

2 hours ago, mattyboi said:

 It seems we are essentially saying the same thing. In the context of no scripted story, the decisions the player makes becomes the story, ie, survival is the story.

Not really. Story is being told, it has direction, narrative, gameplay limitations and predefined end, something that sandbox games generally lack.